Bird doing dooty

I didn't get the focus very good, but I thought this picture had it's own merits.

Checkout the bird on the left, she is not only helping stand lookout, but taking care of other basic callings, too.
--steve buser

Birds, Louisiana, Cameron Parish

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Drought deadly for wildlife

A Killdeer heads to the middle of where it's life sustaining pond used to be. This was shot a few weeks ago when the drought was just sitting in hard. Hopefully, this area along by the Cameron Parish coast got some of the rain from the last few days.

--steve buser

Killdeer, birds, drought

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New bridge will be ready to battle storms

Hurricane Rita slammed the Causeway bridge that connect Texas's Pleasure Island and Louisiana's Cameron Parish on Highway 82, the Gulf Beach Highway. The next Hurricane will have a harder time of disrupting the flow of traffic, as a new highrise bridge is being built to replace the drawbridge. Here the old is to the right and the new climbs on the left over the pass into Lake Sabine.
--steve buser

Highway 82, Cameron Parish, Louisiana, Texas

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Find the kids, quick!

Mom and Dad Black-Necked Stilts (Himantopus mexicanus mexicanus) scurry looking for the little ones when I stepped from my car to take a picture. If you look very closely you can see a rusty, blurry line across the middle of the picture. That is the barbed wire fence I was standing near (and thus it is way out of focus) -- which means they had nothing to fear from me. Not knowing anything about how fences work, the pair scrambled their kids into the brush and then tried to decoy me to other parts of the sparse pond -- two weeks of dry weather have dried up many of the watering holes.
--steve buser

Black-Necked Stilts, Himantopus mexicanus mexicanus

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Cormorants: I got your back

Even these young Double Crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus ) understand the law of survival. "I got your back, you've got mine." I think the pile of weeds they are sitting on along Hwy 82 in Cameron Parish, just near the Texas line is a remnant of Hurricane Ike which send a wall of water through this area last year.
--steve buser

Double Crested Cormorants, Phalacrocorax auritus, Cormorants, Louisiana, Cameron, Texas

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Wished I would have studied Red-Winged Blackbird

Talk about being sorry I didn't take Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) in school instead of French, Spanish and Latin! It would have come in real handy today.

This fellow kept a steady chatter going, aimed at me. My guess is it went something like "Nest? What Nest? Come over here and see if I have a nest. Would I be over here if I had a nest of darling little ones over there? Over here! Come over here! You getting cold.

The fellow was on Highway 82 just over the line into Louisiana. I had gone down to Port Arthur to look for good birding spots and decided to run down Pleasure Island and across into Louisiana and Cameron Parish. It was a productive afternoon.
--steve buser

Red-Winged Blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus, Cameron Parish, Louisiana

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